Cisco and Trend Micro have jointly developed a new service the two are billing …

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Linksys/Cisco announced Tuesday that it's teaming up with online security provider Trend Micro to offer a router with a suite of malware protection tools baked into the device itself. Hardware-based firewalls are nothing new, but the duo claims that the new service—dubbed Home Network Defender—will offer an unsurpassed level of intrusion tracking and detection, all while lifting the computing burden off of your PC. That first claim may be accurate, but a close look at the fine print indicates PCs won't be unburdened anytime soon.

Much of what HND offers falls under the rubric of improved monitoring and more powerful parental controls. Parents/home network "admins" can control and filter what content is accessible to individual IP addresses, set access timers, and create reports on which sites (and what site-types) a child or teenager spends his or her time visiting. An HND-equipped router contains the appropriate software licenses for up to four computers. At present, HND will only be offered across the WRT310N and WRT610N Linksys routers, both of which are 802.11n/four-port solutions; support for the WRT160N will be added in the near future.

HND carries an annual subscription fee of $59.99 per router (each router covers four systems) with a 30-day free trial. For the next 60 days, Linksys will offer an introductory price of $49.99 per year. That breaks out to a very reasonable $14.99 per system (just $12.50 if you ORDER NOW), and since the service ships with four licenses of Trend Micro's AntiVirus + AntiSpyware ($39.95 per copy at the company's website) a buyer is saving a fair amount of money. Then again, the fact that the "Home Network Defender" service comes bundled with standard AV/AS software raises the question of what Linksys product, exactly, customers are buying for that $59.99 annual subscription.

It seems that the baked-in router functions (Linksys) are aimed at providing parents or interested users with much finer-grained control over what sort of content flows over the network and where that content is allowed to go. Similarly, the Linksys HND service could provide solid proof as to whether a system on one's network had been zombified, even if the infectious agent is proving hard to find/isolate on any given system. If you aren't experienced enough to log and parse such data on your own, tools like this could be very appealing.

Not all attacks initiate from outside the router; a compromised system that attaches or reattaches to a protected HND network may still be able to infect the other machines within local access. All of Cisco's literature focuses on HND as an Internet security solution; there's no information on whether or not the service provides any sort of equivalent intranet protection. The company might argue that lifting the need for other tracking software constitutes "unburdening," but that's not what most people think of when they refer to the computational burden of running AV/AS solutions.

Still, at just $14.99 per yearly license, HND isn't expensive, especially if you plan to upgrade your router in the near future. If you happen to demo the service, drop by and let us know how your experience goes, and whether or not the provided tools live up to what Cisco is promising.